> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.itsthespark.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Cooked Without the Search Bar - URL: https://www.itsthespark.com/cooked-without-the-search-bar/ - Published: 2026-10-14T00:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-14T00:00:00.000Z - Description: How often have you found yourself reaching for the enter key when encountering the minutest of problems? If your answer is a “very much so," don’t worry. You are definitely not alone. And if your answer is a “not very much,” consider giving yourself a pat on the back. - Author: Michael Chu - Tags: Personal Essays, Issue 2: Intelligence, #active, Volume 4 The five days I spent on the ATES trip marked the longest period of time that I’d gone without internet access, narrowly beating my previous record of a humble two hours (excluding sleep). 120 full hours without an internet-communication device – a feat I haven’t achieved since losing my first tooth. Even the two-hour boat ride, which I’d normally spend playing Subway Surfers and Geometry Dash, felt painfully long. Upon arrival at Tioman Island, a teacher went down the line, dropping each phone into a labeled bag. Mine went in last. The zipper closed, and with it went my access to practically every answer I’d ever need. I knew I was on this mission. Alone. As night fell on the first day of the trip, I was faced with my first real crisis without a phone: the grasshopper. When we entered our room, there it was, completely unbothered by the presence of me and my seven roommates. Nobody moved. Then all eight of us screamed in sync, at the top of our lungs, directed towards an insect the size of our thumb. Instinctively, I reached my hand into my pocket before my brain caught up. Empty. From the corner furthest from the grasshopper, somebody finally suggested, “Let’s ask Chat! It’ll know what to do for sure!” My eyes darted from one person to the next, waiting for someone to magically pull out their phone. Moments passed. Nothing. Plan A was busted. “Let’s Google it!” There went Plan B. Busted as well. Mustering up all the creativity we had, we swung a towel at it. Then we tried shooing it away with a shoe. No matter what we did, the grasshopper simply refused to budge. As I scanned the room for another weapon, I found myself reminiscing about the good old days. Back home, every problem ran through the sum of the same two steps. A stuck zipper, a stain on the shirt, a question about homework. The same formula every single time. > X + Y = Z > X = LLM search bar. Y = Typing a Request. Z = “All our Problems are Solved”. My problem-solving efforts were capped at figuring out what to put in the ChatGPT prompt. No thinking of my own whatsoever. The formula had no input for the grasshopper. And especially in this situation, we didn’t have the kind of luxury that our phones would spoil us with. Without our phones, as my peers and I would say, we were absolutely cooked. After 3 hours of damage to our vocal cords, we called it a night and accepted the grasshopper as our ninth roommate. The next morning, we left the grasshopper on its bed and set out for the part of the trip I looked forward to the most – snorkeling! Standing on the shore of Tioman, we read over the ATES snorkeling manual, for once, without ChatGPT to summarize its contents. One line: “calculate the yellow fish appearance rates in the surrounding waters.” That was all it said. No calculator, no textbook, and most importantly, no phone. How were we supposed to do this? Calculating the yellow fish appearance rate actually seems pretty simple and straightforward: just count the number of yellow fish over a set time period and divide the numbers. “So we count the yellow fish and divide?” someone asked, as if it was a trick question. “That’s it, right?” someone else said, with no anticipation of a response whatsoever. Nobody answered. We just stared at the same sentence, waiting for someone or at least something to confirm it. We went with it anyway. In the water, our fingers darted towards every flash of yellow. Back on shore, when the other groups read out their numbers and they matched ours, our jaws dropped in awe like we’d won the Super Bowl. It had been a while since we'd experienced something that matched that very feeling of independence. That feeling had diluted by the last day, when my circadian rhythm woke me up at 3am. By far the earliest I'd ever woken up. The day we were finally going to be reunited with our beloved devices. A single glance at the pile of phones on the dining table, and I knew exactly which one was mine. I immediately grabbed it, opened all my socials and did what I had to do: the session kicked off with a light 10 minute Instagram reels block as the dynamic warmup (physiologists say you have to warm up the body before activity). Next, I restored my Snap streaks with my friends. And finally, as the warm-down, I went through my emails and responded to the ones I had to. That session spanned a brisk half hour, and I had done everything I wanted to do with my phone. With time to kill, I did the one thing I never would have expected myself to do. I set the phone down on the chair and just left it there. My iPhone 15 Pro – the one thing I always told myself was going to be THE essential if I ever became cool enough to be invited to[ GQ's 10 Essentials](https://www.gq.com/about/10-essentials?ref=itsthespark.com) – was no longer the survival necessity. The breaking moment. The moment I realized that what had stayed with me was that silent stare at the manual, not the missing screen. Frankly, we didn’t really rely on search engines for content knowledge. Rather, our reliance was tied to the idea of seeking validation from them for our notions, ranging from surface level suggestions to our deepest philosophies. Not having access to these tools wasn't barring or limiting our framework of thinking after all. All it was doing was mitigating confidence in ourselves for whatever we did. We already knew how to count the yellow fish and do basic division (assuming we passed third-grade math). We just didn’t believe it until the other groups said the same. > I used to believe that intelligence meant seeking validation from a machine. Now, I know it’s about trusting the judgment I already have. Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Gmail. Did I forget anything? The one thing no app ever contained. Asking myself first.